No Arabic abstract
Inertial Confinement Fusion is a promising option to provide massive, clean, and affordable energy for humanity in the future. The present status of research and development is hindered by hydrodynamic instabilities occurring at the intense compression of the target fuel by energetic laser beams. A recent proposal Csernai et al. (2018) combines advances in two fields: detonations in relativistic fluid dynamics and radiative energy deposition by plasmonic nano-shells. The initial compression of the target pellet can be eliminated or decreased, not to reach instabilities. A final and more energetic laser pulse can achieve rapid volume ignition, which should be as short as the penetration time of the light across the target. In the present study, we discuss a flat fuel target irradiated from both sides simultaneously. Here we propose an ignition energy with smaller compression, largely increased entropy and temperature increase, and instead of external indirect heating and huge energy loss, a maximized internal heating in the target with the help of recent advances in nano-technology. The reflectivity of the target can be made negligible, and the absorptivity can be increased by one or two orders of magnitude by plasmonic nano-shells embedded in the target fuel. Thus, higher ignition temperature and radiation dominated dynamics can be achieved. Here most of the interior will reach the ignition temperature simultaneously based on the results of relativistic fluid dynamics. This makes the development of any kind of instability impossible, which up to now prevented the complete ignition of the target.
Inertial Confinement Fusion is a promising option to provide massive, clean, and affordable energy for mankind in the future. The present status of research and development is hindered by hydrodynamical instabilities occurring at the intense compression of the target fuel by energetic laser beams. A recent patent combines advances in two fields: detonations in relativistic fluid dynamics and radiative energy deposition by plasmonic nano-shells. The compression of the target pellet can be moderate and rapid volume ignition is achieved by a laser pulse, which is as short as the penetration time of the light across the pellet. The reflectivity of the target can be made negligible, and the absorptivity can be increased by one or two orders of magnitude by plasmonic nano-shells embedded in the target fuel. Thus, higher ignition temperature can be achieved with modest compression. The short light pulse can heat the target so that most of the interior will reach the ignition temperature simultaneously. This makes the development of any kind of instability impossible, which would prevent complete ignition of the target.
In inertial confinement fusion the target implosion non-uniformity is introduced by a driver beams illumination non-uniformity, a fuel target alignment error in a fusion reactor, the target fabrication defect, et al. For a steady operation of a fusion power plant the target implosion should be robust against the implosion non-uniformities. In this paper the requirement for the implosion uniformity is first discussed. The implosion uniformity should be less than a few percent. A study on the fuel hotspot dynamics is also presented and shows that the stagnating plasma fluid provides a significant enhancement of vorticity at the final stage of the fuel stagnation. Then non-uniformity mitigation mechanisms of the heavy ion beam (HIB) illumination are also briefly discussed in heavy ion inertial fusion (HIF). A density valley appears in the energy absorber, and the large-scale density valley also works as a radiation energy confinement layer, which contributes to a radiation energy smoothing. In HIF a wobbling heavy ion beam illumination was also introduced to realize a uniform implosion. In the wobbling HIBs illumination, the illumination non-uniformity oscillates in time and space on a HIF target. The oscillating-HIB energy deposition may contribute to the reduction of the HIBs illumination non-uniformity by its smoothing effect on the HIB illumination non-uniformity and also by a growth mitigation effect on the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
We consider the general problem of charged particle motion in a strong electromagnetic field of arbitrary configuration and find a universal behaviour: for sufficiently high field strengths, the radiation losses lead to a general tendency of the charge to move along the direction that locally yields zero lateral acceleration. The relativistic motion along such a direction results in no radiation losses, according to both classical and quantum descriptions of radiation reaction. We show that such a radiation-free direction (RFD) exists at each point of an arbitrary electromagnetic field, while the time-scale of approaching this direction decreases with the increase of field strength. Thus, in the case of a sufficiently strong electromagnetic field, at each point of space, the charges mainly move and form currents along local RFD, while the deviation of their motion from RFD can be calculated in order to account for their incoherent emission. This forms a general description of particle, and therefore plasma, dynamics in strong electromagnetic fields, the latter can be generated by state-of-the-art lasers or in astrophysical environments.
In inertial fusion, one of scientific issues is to reduce an implosion non-uniformity of a spherical fuel target. The implosion non-uniformity is caused by several factors, including the driver beam illumination non-uniformity, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) growth, etc. In this paper we propose a new control method to reduce the implosion non-uniformity; the oscillating implosion acceleration dg(t) is created by pulsating and dephasing heavy ion beams (HIBs) in heavy ion inertial fusion (HIF). The dg(t) would reduce the RTI growth effectively. The original concept of the non- uniformity control in inertial fusion was proposed in (Kawata, et al., 1993). In this paper it was found that the pulsating and dephasing HIBs illumination provide successfully the controlled dg(t) and that dg(t) induced by the pulsating HIBs reduces well the implosion non-uniformity. Consequently the pulsating HIBs improve a pellet gain remarkably in HIF.
We study electron acceleration in a plasma wakefield under the influence of the radiation-reaction force caused by the transverse betatron oscillations of the electron in the wakefield. Both the classical and the strong quantum-electrodynamic (QED) limits of the radiation reaction are considered. For the constant accelerating force, we show that the amplitude of the oscillations of the QED parameter $chi$ in the radiation-dominated regime reaches the equilibrium value determined only by the magnitude of the accelerating field, while the averaged over betatron oscillations radiation reaction force saturates at the value smaller than the accelerating force and thus is incapable of preventing infinite acceleration. We find the parameters of the electron bunch and the plasma accelerator for which reaching such a regime is possible. We also study effects of the dephasing and the corresponding change of accelerating force over the course of acceleration and conclude that the radiation-dominated regime is realized both in cases of single-stage acceleration with slow dephasing (usually corresponding to bunch-driven plasma accelerators) and multi-stage acceleration with fast dephasing (corresponding to the use of laser-driven accelerators).